Have you read the Hunger Games series? It is a dystopian kind of thing - definite social order overtones....

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Posts: 293 | Registered: Dec 2009

ladyvorkosigan♀ 8283Member # 8283

Posted: 2:58 PM, November 10th (Thursday), 2011

With Banks, "Consider Phlebas," probably to start.

Cherryh, I liked Union-Alliance but I think maybe Chanur would be a better series to start. "Heavy Time" is the first U-A, "Pride of Chanur" is the first Chanur, I think.

I would call the Vorkosigan series - which guess what, I really like! - social sf, but most people would think it's too space opera for that. Most people would be shallow thinkers, though. A reading order for that, however, will require me to make a thorough analysis of your particular case, since I take prescribing Vorkosigan very, very seriously.

It nagged him, in particular, that none of the girls he’d known so far had given him a sense of unalloyed triumph.

Well, Octavia Butler would probably be good for you, then, and maybe Sherri Tepler and Joanna Russ.

If it is the dystopic YA thing where the Youngs are examining a system they have accepted as inevitable or good and deciding that it's not, Hunger Games is good. I know you said no spaceships, but you might like Ender's Game and the sequels (and whatever you call the Bean series) which you will think is spaceships but really is not. I refuse to re-read Ender's Game critically because I don't want to lose the memory of reading it when I was young and my jaw dropping and for the first time having a really well-formed "Adults lie" moment, and then as I proceeded over the years, I got to "Adults are lied to" and then "There's no such thing as an adult."

You might want to think about whether it is really space and aliens you find problematic or if it's really that you don't want anything leaning to hard sf, which tends to care much more about technology than about human interaction. The presence of aliens in no way means it isn't ultimately about human interaction. Humans are writing it, after all. And settings on other planets are sometimes really just opportunities to look at what happens when different cultures clash, with species subbing for real world race, nationality, etc. Lots of Le Guin's work is that way. Her father was an anthropologist iirc and she grew up all over the world where he was doing his research. Plus she has some of the loveliest titles, like "The Word for World is Forest." You still have the youthful innocence thing coming up against adults and their lies.